Multiple Objective Planning for Production and Distribution Model of Supply Chain: Case of Bicycle Manufacturer

Under increasing globalization, enterprises view supply chains (SC) as an integration of process control and management. The bicycle industry is one of the competitive industries in Taiwan, for which there is a complete supply chain system. To internationalize and improve the competitive advantage of this industry, it is necessary for it to improve the capacity of global production and distribution. In this paper, we consider both the maximum profit of enterprises and the maximum quality of customer service, using five programming methods to construct multi-objective production and distribution models. These five methods are: compromise programming, fuzzy multi-objective programming, weighted multi-objective programming, weighted fuzzy multi-objective programming and two-phase fuzzy multi-objective programming. The results reveal that the weighted multi-objective model was better for considering the maximum profit of enterprises and the maximum quality of customer service. Finally, we use the weighted multi-objective model for sensitivity analysis. These results show that after raising the per-unit production cost in production processes, the total profit would decrease. In addition, if the unit inventory cost increases due to improving the customer service level, then the total profit might increase, but not significantly. Furthermore, the shortage cost seems have interactive behavior on the enterprises, in which an increase of inventory cost will lower shortage cost

Image Fusion with Contrast Improving and Feature Preserving

The goal of image fusion is to obtain a fused image that contains most significant information in all input images which were captured by different sensors from the same scene. In particular, the fusion process should improve the contrast and keep the integrity of significant features from input images. In this paper, we propose a region-based image fusion method to fuse spatially registered visible and infrared images while improving the contrast and preserving the significant features of input images. At first, the proposed method decomposes input images into base layers and detail layers using a bilateral filter. Then the base layers of the input images are segmented into regions. Third, a region-based decision map is proposed to represent the importance of every region. The decision map is obtained by calculating the weights of regions according to the gray-level difference between each region and its neighboring regions in the base layers. At last, the detail layers and the base layers are separately fused by different fusion rules based on the same decision map to generate a final fused image. Experimental results qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the contrast of fused images and preserve more features of input images than several previous image fusion methods

Clinical applicability of quantitative nailfold capillaroscopy in differential diagnosis of connective tissue diseases with Raynaud's phenomenon

Background/PurposeNailfold capillaroscopy is a useful tool to distinguish primary from secondary Raynaud's phenomenon (RP) by examining the morphology of nailfold capillaries but its role in disease diagnosis is not clearly established. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the roles of quantitative nailfold capillaroscopy in differential diagnosis of connective tissue diseases (CTDs) with RP.MethodsThe data between the year 2005 and 2009 were retrieved from the nailfold capillaroscopic database of National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH). Only the data from the patients with RP were analyzed. The criteria for interpretation of capillaroscopic findings were predefined. The final diagnoses of the patients were based on the American College of Rheumatology classification criteria for individual diseases, independent of nailfold capillaroscopic findings. The sensitivity and the specificity of each capillaroscopic pattern to the diseases were determined.ResultsThe data from a total of 67 patients were qualified for the current study. We found the sensitivity and specificity of scleroderma pattern for systemic sclerosis (SSc) were 89.47% and 80%, and the specificity of the early, active, and late scleroderma patterns for SSc reached 87.5%, 97.5%, and 95%, respectively. The sensitivity/specificity of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) pattern for SLE and polymyositis/dermatomyositis (PM/DM) pattern for PM/DM were 33.33%/95.45% and 60%/96.3%, respectively. The sensitivity/specificity of mixed connective tissue disease (MCTD) pattern for MCTD were 20%/100%.ConclusionThe nailfold capillaroscopic (NC) patterns may be useful in the differential diagnosis of CTDs with RP. The NC patterns for SSc and PM/DM are both sensitive and specific to the diseases, while the SLE and MCTD patterns exhibit high specificity but relatively low sensitivity

From Big Scholarly Data to Solution-Oriented Knowledge Repository

The volume of scientific articles grows rapidly, producing a scientific basis for understanding and identifying research problems and state-of-the-art solutions. Despite the considerable significance of the problem-solving information, existing scholarly recommending systems lack the ability to retrieve this information from the scientific articles for generating knowledge repositories and providing problem-solving recommendations. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel framework to build solution-oriented knowledge repositories and provide recommendations to solve given research problems. The framework consists of three modules: a semantics-based information extraction module mining research problems and solutions from massive academic papers; a knowledge assessment module based on the heterogeneous bibliometric graph and a ranking algorithm; and a knowledge repository generation module to produce solution-oriented maps with recommendations. Based on the framework, a prototype scholarly solution support system is implemented. A case study is carried out in the research field of intrusion detection, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method

Analysing academic paper ranking algorithms using test data and benchmarks:an investigation

Research on academic paper ranking has received great attention in recent years, and many algorithms have been proposed to automatically assess a large number of papers for this purpose. How to evaluate or analyse the performance of these ranking algorithms becomes an open research question. Theoretically, evaluation of an algorithm requires to compare its ranking result against a ground truth paper list. However, such ground truth does not exist in the field of scholarly ranking due to the fact that there does not and will not exist an absolutely unbiased, objective, and unified standard to formulate the impact of papers. Therefore, in practice researchers evaluate or analyse their proposed ranking algorithms by different methods, such as using domain expert decisions (test data) and comparing against predefined ranking benchmarks. The question is whether using different methods leads to different analysis results, and if so, how should we analyse the performance of the ranking algorithms? To answer these questions, this study compares among test data and different citation-based benchmarks by examining their relationships and assessing the effect of the method choices on their analysis results. The results of our experiments show that there does exist difference in analysis results when employing test data and different benchmarks, and relying exclusively on one benchmark or test data may bring inadequate analysis results. In addition, a guideline on how to conduct a comprehensive analysis using multiple benchmarks from different perspectives is summarised, which can help provide a systematic understanding and profile of the analysed algorithms.</p

Temperature-dependent evolutions of excitonic superfluid plasma frequency in a srong excitonic insulator candidate, Ta2_2NiSe5_5

We investigate an interesting anisotropic van der Waals material, Ta$_{2}$NiSe$_{5}$, using optical spectroscopy. Ta$_{2}$NiSe$_{5}$ has been known as one of the few excitonic insulators proposed over 50 years ago. Ta$_{2}$NiSe$_{5}$ has quasi-one dimensional chains along the $a$-axis. We have obtained anisotropic optical properties of a single crystal Ta$_{2}$NiSe$_{5}$ along the $a$- and $c$-axes. The measured $a$- and $c$-axis optical conductivities exhibit large anisotropic electronic and phononic properties. With regard to the $a$-axis optical conductivity, a sharp peak near 3050 cm$^{-1}$ at 9 K, with a well-defined optical gap ($\Delta^{EI} \simeq$ 1800 cm$^{-1}$) and a strong temperature-dependence, is observed. With an increase in temperature, this peak broadens and the optical energy gap closes around $\sim$325 K($T_c^{EI}$). The spectral weight redistribution with respect to the frequency and temperature indicates that the normalized optical energy gap ($\Delta^{EI}(T)/\Delta^{EI}(0)$) is $1-(T/T_c^{EI})^2$. The temperature-dependent superfluid plasma frequency of the excitonic condensation in Ta$_{2}$NiSe$_{5}$ has been determined from measured optical data. Our findings may be useful for future research on excitonic insulators.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

Interaction-induced Metal to Topological Insulator Transition

By means of exact diagonalizations, the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang model at quarter-filling in the limit of strong Hubbard on-site repulsion is investigated. We find that the non-interacting metallic state will be turned into a Chern insulator with saturated magnetization under strong correlations. That is, at such a metal-insulator transition, both the topological and the magnetic properties of the system are changed due to spontaneous breaking of time reversal symmetry in the ground states. According to our findings, this topological phase transition seems to be of first order. Our results illustrate the interesting physics in topological Mott transitions and provide guidance to the search of more interaction-induced topological phases in similar systems.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Sphingobium estronivorans sp. nov. and Sphingobium bisphenolivorans sp. nov., isolated from a wastewater treatment plant

Two Gram-stain-negative, aerobic, motile and rod-shaped bacteria, one designated as strain AXB(T), capable of degrading estrogens, and another, YL23(T), capable of degrading estrogen and bisphenol A, were isolated from activated sludge in Xiamen City, PR China. The optimum temperature and pH of both strains were 25-35 degrees C and pH 7.0-8.0. While strain AXB(T) could tolerate 3% (w/v) NaCl, YL23(T) could only grow between 0-1 % (w/v) NaCl. They contained ubiquinone-10 as the major quinone, spermidine as the major polyamine, summed feature 8 (comprising C-18:1 omega 6c and/or C-18:1 omega 7c) as the major fatty acids and diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidyldimethylethanolamine, phosphatidylethanolamine, phosphatidylglycerol and sphingoglycolipid as the major polar lipids. The DNA G+C contents of strains AXB(T) and YL23(T) were 63.6 and 63.7 mol%, respectively. Based on the results of 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis, strains AXB(T) and YL23(T) belonged to the genus Sphingobium. Strain AXB(T) was most closely related to Sphingobium chlorophenolicum NBRC 16172(T) (97.5%) and Sphingobium chungbukense DJ77(T) (97.2%), and strain YL23(T) was most closely related to S. chlorophenolicum NBRC 16172(T) (97.4%) and S. quisquiliarum P25(T) (97.1%). Average nucleotide identity values between these two strains and S. chlorophenolicum NBRC 16172(T), S. chungbukense DJ77(T), Sphingobium chinhatense IP26(T), Sphingobium quisquiliarum P25(T) and Sphingobium japonicum UT26S(T) were from 80.7 to 85.8%. In conclusion, strains AXB(T) and YL23(T) represent novel species of the genus Sphingobium, for which the names Sphingobium estronivorans sp. nov. and Sphingobium bisphenolivorans sp. nov. are proposed, respectively. The type strains of S. estronivorans and S. bisphenolivorans are AXB(T) (=MCCC 1K01232(T) =DSM 102173(T)) and YL23(T) (=MCCC 1K02300(T) =DSM 102172(T)). respectively